Homesickness

An American History

Susan J. Matt

Takes on American history from a fascinating new thematic lens that considers how homesickness has affected us from the settler era to boomerang kids and social networking.

Looks at homesickness as it affects key demographics such as soldiers, college students, summer campers, and immigrants.

Challenges the common notion that Americans have been a naturally restless and mobile people by exploring their connection to home.

New in Paperback

Homesickness

An American History

Susan J. Matt

Description

Homesickness today is dismissed as a sign of immaturity, what children feel at summer camp, but in the nineteenth century it was recognized as a powerful emotion. When gold miners in California heard the tune "Home, Sweet Home," they sobbed. When Civil War soldiers became homesick, army doctors sent them home, lest they die. Such images don't fit with our national mythology, which celebrates the restless individualism of colonists, explorers, pioneers, soldiers, and immigrants who supposedly left home and never looked back.

Using letters, diaries, memoirs, medical records, and psychological studies, this wide-ranging book uncovers the profound pain felt by Americans on the move from the country's founding until the present day. Susan Matt shows how
colonists in Jamestown longed for and often returned to England, African Americans during the Great Migration yearned for their Southern homes, and immigrants nursed memories of Sicily and Guadalajara and, even after years in America, frequently traveled home. These iconic symbols of the undaunted, forward-looking American spirit were often homesick, hesitant, and reluctant voyagers. National ideology and modern psychology obscure this truth, portraying movement as easy, but in fact Americans had to learn how to leave home, learn to be individualists. Even today, in a global society that prizes movement and that condemns homesickness as a childish emotion, colleges counsel young adults and their families on how to manage the transition away from home, suburbanites pine for their old
neighborhoods, and companies take seriously the emotional toll borne by relocated executives and road warriors. In the age of helicopter parents and boomerang kids, and the new social networks that sustain connections across the miles, Americans continue to assert the significance of home ties.

By highlighting how Americans reacted to moving farther and farther from their roots, Homesickness: An American History revises long-held assumptions about home, mobility, and our national identity.

Homesickness

An American History

Susan J. Matt

Author Information

Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. She is the author of Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930.

New in Paperback

Homesickness

An American History

Susan J. Matt

Reviews and Awards

"[An] indispensable new book, which belongs on the shelf of important works of American revisionism....Matt shows that we are reluctant immigrants, hesitant pioneers, unenthusiastic warriors, and ambivalent modernizers who really would have rather skipped all the unpleasantness and stayed home." - Peter Duffy, The New Republic

"Brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed, Homesickness: An American History is original, refreshingly broad, and persuasive. With deep archival research and an eye for the telling detail, Susan Matt tells a powerful, enduring story of an important but often overlooked emotion in US history. Any proper understanding of the American national character is incomplete without this book."-Mark M. Smith, author of Camille, 1969: Histories of a Hurricane

"This lively and sweeping book gives a concrete history to what seems like a universal emotion, by simultaneously jogging the reader's own memories while situating them in the broad context of U.S. history from the Pilgrims' Landing to the Frequent Flyer. Filling her book with vivid anecdotes of real people-from aspiring immigrants to runaway slaves to our troops in Iraq-Susan J. Matt finds that homesickness is the very heart of the American Dream. Writing at the cutting edge of deeply researched cultural history and cementing her status as a master of analytical storytelling, she helps us understand why being American truly means that 'you can't go home again.'"-Scott A. Sandage, author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

"A richly panoramic social and cultural history, extensively researched and beautifully written. As Susan Matt argues, historians have been far more apt to study those who came to America, rather than those who yearned to leave and return to previous homes. Focusing on the many Americans who sought to leave, or who yearned for another 'home' as they moved about the country, Matt provides a fascinating addition to several intersecting literatures on immigration, on westward expansion, on forced migration and slavery, on the Civil War and World Wars, and on the rise of modernity and 'alienated' individuals."-Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine

"People dying of homesickness? Susan Matt richly describes the history of an emotion that was at times so deeply felt that it was considered a deadly disease. With this sweeping and yet detailed survey, Matt demonstrates that emotions have histories. As Americans have learned to restrain this one, we may have forgotten how powerful this longing can be."-Claude S. Fischer, author of Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character

"Challenges the foundational stereotype of Americans as adventurous, intrepid, eagerly mobile individualists .Matt provides ample and convincing documentary and ethnographic evidence that Americans are nothing if not ambivalent about their mobility and nostalgic and homesick for the homes they leave behind." --CHOICE